When he won last year's Nobel prize for literature, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa became the fourth Spanish-language author to be awarded the accolade since Gabriel García Márquez in 1982. This is a recognition of the importance of an outstanding generation of writers in both Latin America and Spain.

But Vargas Llosa and García Márquez are very much the old guard. This new issue of Granta introduces the reader to 22 writers of the new generation. The editors have taken Franco's death at the end of 1975 as a watershed, making their selection from writers born in or after that year. While it was undoubtedly a turning point in Spain, those born in Latin America had to wait another 10 or 20 years for the advent of relatively stable and democratic governments.

So what are the interests of this rising group? First and foremost, the tigers and jungles of magical realism have given way to the literary bunfights of writing workshops. The last story in the anthology, by the Argentine Patricio Pron, makes plain this inward-looking gaze. His narrator is a provincial writer who has come to Buenos Aires to make good. Such is the literary density of the city that he finds himself living "literally, beneath the living Argentine author" – an ironic reference to the established older generation. But he soon hits on the problem facing many of his peers: "I asked myself how the living Argentine writer did it, how . . . books so fucking good that I could never write them since they presupposed things like a good education and not suffering cold or hunger and not having grown up filled with dread, how the very existence of these books didn't prevent him from writing his own."

From Bolivia, Rodrigo Hasbún in "The Place of Losses" presents us with not one but two aspiring authors, who have met in a writing workshop. Their lives and writing styles collide, with confusion the result. Lucía Puenzo goes still further. She is a film-maker and adds another twist by bringing an aged García Márquez into her story, as a leader of a workshop at a film festival. The main thrust of her story lies elsewhere, however: the violence that men inflict on women, for no explicable reason. This almost casual sexual violence can be found elsewhere, as in "The Coming Flood" by Andres Barba. This is the diary of a woman desperate to have plastic surgery, who turns to prostitution to save enough money. Here and in other stories, the violence has become personal rather than overtly political: in general, there is a retreat from any idea of political action or involvement in "good, brave causes".

In Pola Oloixarac's "Conditions for the Revolution", the young female narrator looks disdainfully at her mother's pitiful attempts to believe that revolution is still possible in Argentina. Several authors are concerned with the links or lack of them between the generations; others offer gentle examples of the passage from adolescence to adulthood. As the editors point out: "the writers in this issue . . . tell stories which are quotidian". They take their cue from Carver rather than Cortázar, only occasionally showing any appetite for formal invention or the fantastic.

Overall, there is a sense that these writers have lost much of the boldness of their predecessors. Their talents lie in half-tones, in ironies or close observation, their canvases are deliberately small. This generation is almost entirely urban, and is more likely to have travelled to New York than their rural hinterlands. And while in Grantaland there are eight Argentine writers and six Spaniards, there is only one Mexican, and no one from central America or the Caribbean.